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Business schools have been under fire for their alleged inefficacy in developing students’ managerial skills in MBA programs. On the basis of extant learning theories, the purpose of this paper is to propose a reconsideration of learning goals and assessment procedures for managerial skill development within MBA education.

The authors review the literatures on stage, experiential, social, and action learning theories to identify pedagogical suggestions for optimal skill development and to highlight the constraints program administrators and teachers face in efforts to advance students’ acquisition of complex managerial skills in MBA classrooms.

Conceptually, the authors argue that an emphasis on mastering complex managerial skills – as an expected learning outcome – might be an overly ambitious goal that can lead to neglecting early attainments in skill acquisition and create false impressions of MBA program failure. Furthermore, the authors discuss how MBA programs could consider the use of newer evaluation procedures for evaluating skill development.

The paper calls for greater attention to intermediate stages of managerial skill development for establishing learning goals, the consideration of knowledge structures for assessing the degree of skill development, and a focus on managerial skill development as a life‐long process.

Posits that every enterprise must institutionalize its workplace learning systems and opportunities in such a way that it radiates what it has already achieved and from this moves on to realize its full potential – in short, the enterprise itself is the key. Examines in successive chapters: the individual manager and questioning insights (Q); the major systems which the enterprise uses to capture and structure its learning; a SWOT analysis of the enterprise′s total learning; action learning, its contribution to the achievement of enterprise growth, and the role of programmed knowledge (P); the Enterprise School of Management (ESM) as a phoenix of enlightenment and effectiveness rising from the ashes of traditional, less effective management training initiatives; and, finally, the practical realization of the action learning dream, as evidenced by emerging examples of successful and profitable implementation worldwide. Concludes with a selection of pertinent abstracts.

The paper has been developed from a critical review of available literature drawn from the micro firm, managerial capability and innovation management fields. The paper aims to address these issues.

The paper has been developed from a critical review of available literature drawn from the micro firm, managerial capability and innovation management fields.

Four criteria of micro firm managerial capability emerge from micro firm managerial traits in the literature namely, leadership; strategic thinking; problem solving and people relationships. The review also shows that micro firms are embedded in three resource pools which include stakeholder ties; the local community and the proximate market environment. Micro firm managerial capability is argued to emerge from the interaction of the managerial capability criteria and the resources in a process mediated by the resource based and dynamic capabilities perspectives from the strategic management literature.

A gap in the academic literature is identified and the proposed theoretical model is presented to address this deficiency in the literature. Future empirical research is recommended.

This proposed model will allow practitioners to better conceptualise and design programmes that will assist companies in developing managerial capabilities to innovate. Deep links between hotel industry practitioners and the academic community will enable the effective dissemination of the research.

Hotel micro firms play an important social and economic role. There has been little research into how they innovate and specifically into managerial capability for innovation in context. The present research uses conceptual research to map the field and identify critical avenues for future research.

Despite significant theoretical work over the past decade, the phenomenon of trust and the process of its development in managerial relationships remain elusive in theory and practice. This paper revisits theories that frame trust development in order to explore the development of trust in the specific social context of managerial relationships. Managerial relationships are often characterised by politics and the pursuit of hidden agendas and self‐interest. Competing perspectives and personal motivations can conspire to render even the most innocent of acts subject to scrutiny and suspicion. In these senses, high levels of trust are not commensurate with ideal conditions for managerial effectiveness. Examines the realistic possibilities for trust development set in the context of managerial relationships, and in the process of this analysis, creates a set of propositions that could inform further theory development and empirical investigation of the area.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

To investigate the factors predicting the career progression of hotel managers working in international hotel chains in Ireland, Europe and Asia.

The study uses a cross‐sectional questionnaire design consisting of 337 respondents. It investigates individual‐ and organisational‐level factors that potentially explain the career progression of hotel managers.

The study reveals significant differences in managerial progression in the three sub‐samples. A multiplicity of factors explains differences in advancement. These include demographic, human capital, psychological characteristics of the manager and organisational characteristics. The model developed in the paper explained significant variance in three measures of managerial advancement: salary level, number of job moves, and position reached in the hierarchy.

The study is based on self‐report data and the response rates are slightly below those reported for behavioural science research. The study does not gather the perceptions of the managers' superiors. The findings indicate that managerial advancement is explained by a complex set of factors, which would benefit from further investigation.

The study findings suggest important practical implications for the provision of training and development, individual and organisational career strategies, the role of networking in advancement and the respective roles of managers and organisations in managing careers.

The paper has a cross‐cultural dimension which to date is largely absent from this area of research.

The aim of this study is to investigate both the path taken by companies in order to survive in a competitive environment and the factors that have favoured or limited their development.

The study was carried out using a retrospective approach. Empirical evidence was gathered using a descriptive survey and data collected during previous research programs involving 100 SMEs located in the Veneto region (Italy).

The findings show that a lack of organizational capabilities is one of the main factors limiting development in SMEs. The companies investigated appear to follow similar paths and performance measurement systems (PMS) could play a key role as a potential driver of managerial development in SMEs.

The study refers solely to Italian SMEs located in the Veneto region. Conclusions on the role played by PMS as a system for supporting development were based on a theoretical study; an ad hoc empirical study would be useful for further investigation of this topic.

The study emphasizes the important role played by organizational capability for favouring the competitiveness and survival of SMEs. The study indicated that in SMEs managerial developments usually come later, following changes in strategy. Firms could prevent managerial crisis by implementing managerial systems.

Traditionally the growth of SMEs is measured by turnover and number of employees. This study highlights the importance of investigating not only quantitative, but also qualitative growth to analyse development in SMEs. PMS is presented as a key managerial system that can support qualitative growth and promote the competitiveness of SMEs.

This paper aims to explore management control in the strategic development of business model and managerial innovations. The issue is approached from the perspective of managerial work, aiming to outline what managers consider as essential elements of management control in these often iterative and learning-intensive developmental activities.

The study is based on the views of 20 managers engaged in strategic development and its control in various organisations. The interview data consist of the respondents’ experiences and project cases involving non-technological innovations. Qualitative content analysis is used to identify three key concepts of management control of business model and managerial innovations.

The findings suggest that with managerial and business model innovation, appropriate management control could be established by aligning the innovation being developed with the strategic story of the organisation, leveraging co-creational projects and experimentation with close customer contact.

The focus of this qualitative research is on building an initial framework. Future research could expand understanding of managerial work and accounting by examining this study’s outcomes in more practical detail in various contexts.

The findings of this study lead managers and researchers to consider management control of non-technological innovations as an enabling system supporting successful innovations.

This study adds a unique perspective to the literature by conceptualising and offering managerial implications for management control in the context of strategic development of non-technological innovations.

An integrated model of management and managerial behaviour linked to the process of management development is presented. A conceptual base is provided for understanding relationships among areas of general management theory. The contrasting ideas of various writers are rationalised in terms of both organisational and social responsibilities of management. A useful framework for discussion and adaptation, and for identifying future areas of research is provided. Studies can concentrate on both the importance of each area of the model and on their interrelationships.

Personality profiling in today’s business world has become an essential organisational development practice targeted at identifying a set of employees' traits, which differentiate an employee from one another. Given the assumption that personality traits form an essential indicator of developing the potential of an individual workforce, possible to establish how employees function in a certain job role and their suitability for the particular tasks in an organisation. This study aims to explore the relationship between personality traits, assessment centres (ACs) quality and management development in Nigeria telecommunication organisation among its managers.

The study employed multi-stage sampling techniques and further stratified the hierarchy of the management and finally used a simple random sampling strategy on each stratum. A combination of 482 managers in Nigerian telecommunication organisations participated in this study. The study investigated 12 hypotheses and 1 mediating postulation. Multiple scales were adapted to measure dimensions of endogenous and exogenous variables along the path of mediating variables of the study. The study employed a cross-sectional survey approach to administering the research instrument across all the departments among the managers of the organisations. A structural equation model of assessment was used to analyse the data collected from managers of the telecoms organisations.

The outcome of the study was significant, 10 of the postulated hypotheses were found to be significant while 3 were not significant. The study revealed that a combination of openness to experience, conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness and extraversion personality have no significant relationship with the AC. Also, employees who are high in neuroticism like being emotionally unstable did not find a significant relationship with the AC. In a similar situation, the combined effect of all the big-five personalities was not significant in management development among the managers of the telecommunication industry. The AC is discovered to mediate between personality traits and management development. Individually, the big-five model finds a significant relationship with AC and management development, respectively.

The study is restricted to managers of the Nigerian telecoms industry alone and not all the entire workforce. It adopted cross-sectional analysis to make an inference on all the managers of the organisations. The implication is that the period of the view of a particular point in a sequence of the event may not be representative. Another implication is that the results from the cross-sectional design are for the relationship, and they do not indicate causation.

In practice, this study has shown that personality profiling is important to managing organisational behaviour to highlight a set of traits of employees suitable for peculiar roles. This study implies that personality elements constitute a vital signal of the potential development of the workforce. It helps to illuminate an individual functioning style in a certain task situation, therefore determining both professional and managerial suitability in performing a given role.